Hey guys, today in this blog is going to feature Nick D’Aloisio, one of the youngest self-made millionaires, at the age of only 18.
Nick D’Aloisio a Austrain-born British programmer and an entrepreneur who created Summly, a news summarization app and sold it to Yahoo for reportedly $30 million. He was 17 at that time. Summly uses an artificial intelligence technology developed with SRI International.
D’Aloisio is now a full time member of Yahoo’s mobile engineering team. He launched the Yahoo’s News Digest which Yahoo describes as an evolution of the work he did at Summly. Yahoo News Digest delivers the most important news twice a day, right to your mobile device. The digests provide a definitive summary of all the need-to-know news so you can stay on top of what’s happening. Each story summarizes the most important stories of the day into bite-size content. Instead of just a textual summary it offers visual “atoms” — photos, videos, tweets, maps — there are around 14 atoms.
D’Aloisio is also known as the world’s youngest venture based-capital entrepreneur, raising $300,000 from Hong Kong billionaire Sir Li Ka-shing’s Horizon Ventures for Summly. Then he raised $1.23 million in 2012 from various A-List celebrity investors, including Yoko Ono, Rupert Murdoch, Stephen Fry and Ashton Kutcher.
His first product was Trimit application for iOS in March 2011. which used an analytical tool to compress text content into 1000, 500, or 140-character summary text. The app caught the attention of Apple who featured Trimit as a new and noteworthy application on the App Store. He then used the feedback and criticism of Trimit, to redesign the app and re-launched it in December 2011, as Summly.
Recently named “Innovator of the Year” by the Wall Street Journal, also appeared in the Forbes under 30 list. D’Aloisio was placed #30 on the 2014 Silicon Valley 100 by Business Insider. He received many more awards.
When asked what are some mistakes young entrepreneurs make while pitching to venture capital investors, he said, ” I think some entrepreneurs focus too much on the idea, but not enough on the planned implementation or quantifying the success of their solution. Metrics, plans, patents and implementations are just as important as the initial idea.” in an interview with Entrepreneur.com. Further he also said that as there are many online resources that the primary goal in order to succeed something is to learn various skills like programming, business development, marketing, design etc.
-Vatsal Doshi
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